


footsteps, allegretto, you

by doublelead



Category: THE iDOLM@STER: SideM
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Pre-Canon, Slice of Life, they talk about things and they do nothing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-08
Updated: 2018-08-08
Packaged: 2019-06-23 15:59:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15609849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublelead/pseuds/doublelead
Summary: “Do you want me to help you look?”Jirou stays quiet, traces faint lines by his feet, around the bottle of bubble solution some centimetres away, along the straw he leaves next to it. The puddle of light spilling out from under Rui’s feet doesn’t quite reach him, where he is.He settles for the faint glow filtering past his own glass panes, muted colours playing shapes on his shoulders.“I wonder if it’s something you could find that easily, even.”





	footsteps, allegretto, you

**Author's Note:**

> hap birth rui

“Can you see them, that way?”

For a moment, Jirou thinks he might have seen the outline of his breath, passing through the straw between his lips, in the soap bubbles trailing up the night sky. The light from Rui’s open window trace the surface — a prismatic halo, the subtlest yellow, warm, short-lived as it disappears just as fast, into stardust.

“Hmm.” Jirou tilts his head, gives himself a second or two of thought. He hears white noise from somewhere behind him, the TV in his otherwise dark room left on a local variety channel. “No, not really.”

“Aren’t you cold?” It’s the railing below Rui’s window, this time, between commercial jingles, clicking closed.

“A little, now that you mention it.” Jirou laughs, sheepish, as he turns to look, at something other than the odd or so static of the dark clouds.

The veranda floor is cold under his feet; he wonders if his toes are red like the tip of Rui’s nose. He can’t really tell, wisps of his hair against his face, shadows falling past his chin, down to his knees.

“Do you want me to help you look?”

Jirou stays quiet, starts drawing faint lines by his feet, around the bottle of bubble solution some centimetres away, along the straw he leaves next to it. The puddle of light spilling out from under Rui’s feet doesn’t quite reach him, where he is.

He settles for the faint glow filtering past his own glass panes, muted colours playing shapes over his shoulders.

“I wonder if it’s something you could find that easily, even.”

He doesn’t know how his smile must have looked, can’t see it in the grin he receives in return, either.

“Curious, isn’t it!” Jirou’s cheeks start to ache, a kind of warmth brushing at the edge of his eyes as Rui leans forward, against his own balcony and over, peeking into his. “Then, that’s probably something you'd have to find out for yourself, Mister Yamashita!”

 

 

* * *

 

 

He tries not think about how far up the clouds are, now that he could see them, in the gaps between the tall buildings surrounding his apartment lot. At some-twenty thousand feet below, behind a first floor balcony window, his hair sticks up every which way.

It’s a little before four in the morning, when Jirou finds himself watching the sky turn a soft powder blue.

A flutter of white at the corner of his eye trails him off, pulls him partway from looking down at the wood grains under his toes, to the lightweight lace curtains of Rui's window, splaying out into the morning breeze.

He hides an exasperated huff, presses the heel of his palm onto a smile threatening to pour out.

At a little past four-thirty in the morning. Jirou finds the same honey-yellow light from last night, only a fair bit more faded, this time, still leaving its tracks across the next railings over.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

“ _Hmmm_ _._ ”

Jirou spins a bubble blower between his fingers. The rickety old cooler in the science preparation room whirs it absolute best for dear life. As an added bonus, it’s especially humid today — almost disgustingly so. 

And yet, he lets the midday summer air hit his face.

He could, technically, slink back into his shaded haven, close all the curtains, and proceed to read horse magazines in the bliss the dim room would provide him, but he doesn’t.

Somehow, he keeps his arms folded atop the windowsill, looking out towards the school field.

“The sun...? _Mm_ _mm_ that’s not it, either,” he mouths around the end of the bubble blower. He just about stops himself from chewing it out of frustration, remembers that the school nurse is probably sick of seeing his sad, sorry mug.

The school nurse already has to routinely put up with him and his low blood pressure, on top of the frequent lab accidents he and his classes would have — as per usual — all throughout the semester. Giving first aid to an old man who had mistakenly swallowed soap doesn’t seem like it’d be anywhere near her holiday checklist.

The least Jirou could do was not be a blight in her existence, if only for the scant three months before the cycle continues again. She deserves at least this much.

He’s too lazy to move, so Jirou makes do with giving himself a mental pat on the back, for how considerate he’s being. Though, the bubbles he blew instead feels particularly crabby this time round, but at that point he may just be projecting.

“A spark?” _No, i_ _t_ _would have had disappeared, high above his head, long before he could catch it._

Slowly, the bubbles start to drift, away from the tall mesh fence, to the sound of squeaking sneakers, the tennis club at summer practice.

Jirou feels nothing but air, passing in-between the fingertips he has outstretched. It’s too late to catch anything, but he still pretends. Squinting one eye closed, standing on the tip of his toes, he thinks that he could maybe reach, by a hair’s breadth, even a hint of the refracted iridescence.

He catches blurred lines instead, an after image – his palm falls open, to the tip of Rui’s finger following the ebb and flow of a stray bubble floating gently downwards.

It pops, right against the soft pads of his skin.

Rui’s laugh comes with a clipboard hugged to his chest, sunshine over his shoulders as he turns to wave up at Jirou.

“ _Uwahhh,_ that’s bright,” Jirou mutters, where Rui can’t hear. He offers a lopsided grin, a small wave of his own. “Well, he’s not lacking on that front, at least.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“To think that the day when Rui has it together more than I do would come.”

Rui’s blue umbrella pops open over his shoulder in front of him. Jirou hears him hum, quiet under trickling rain, the soft buzz of the fluorescent lamps in the overhang above the entrance steps.

“Don’t bully!” He turns on his heels, twirling his umbrella all the while. “I happened to check the weather this morning!”

“You probably never take your umbrella out of your bag in the first place,” Jirou snorts, not without fondness, slipping his hands into his pockets.

“ _Eheh,_ you got me there!” Rui’s hair looks fluffier than usual in the humidity, flyaway strands bouncing against the inside of the canopy as he shifts his weight back and forth between his feet. It takes a few beats, of them looking out at the darkened sky, the empty spaces their students left behind, before he asks, almost playfully, brows knitted together, tongue peeking out, “So, are you coming with?"

 

 

* * *

 

It must be sometime around five in the afternoon, when they pass a small family field. Rain clouds begin to clear, and crackling through the neighbourhood speakers is a section from Dvorak’s New World Symphony, as Jirou’s lingers by the hedge, the last of the steady drizzle staining his sleeves.  

“Mister Yamashita?” Rui calls for him, a few steps ahead.

“Oh, nah, sorry,” Jirou replies, a little airy, quite the slightest bit dazed. His gaze falls somewhere just above Rui’s head, at a cluster of sunflowers from the gardens, in full bloom. “You were saying?

“The festival tomorrow?” The way Rui asks his question almost felt idle, if they’ve not been talking about it the whole walk home. He folds his umbrella closed, taps it twice against the side of his shoes, thrice on the pavement.

“Oh, right, you wanted to rent out yukatas?” Jirou can’t remember the last time he wore one. The amount of trouble it entails nearly made him decide against the idea, but every once in a while, he thinks, things like this doesn’t sound like it would be half bad.

“Yeah!” Rui says in his usual upwards lilt, his fingers laced together over the hooked handle of his umbrella. He’s on his tip toes, a leg kicked out while he turns, continuing to walk further along the road. “I think you’d look good in mauve!”

“Ehhh? Isn’t that a little lively for an old man?” Jirou whines. He sighs, partly for show, heavy with the steps he takes to catch up to him.

Past the overlooking sunflowers, Jirou spares a short glance, a soft smile, a hand raised up to feel velveteen petals ruffle against the underside of his nails. In front of him, is the sight of Rui — taking shorter strides than he usually would — Rui’s back, the ends of Rui’s hair, swaying at the nape of his shirt

It should be fine, Jirou lets himself believe, for him to be like this, from time to time.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“I wonder if I actually know what I’m looking for,” says Jirou. Toying with the empty paper cup in his hands, they’re almost heel-to-toe with the crowds around them, seated on a piece of tarp by river bank, looking up towards the fireworks display.

“Are you actually looking for it?” He didn’t think that he could’ve heard him, surprised when he feels warmth seep into his fingers, Rui refilling his cup with tea from their flask.

A string of sparks bloom across the sky above them, bursts of blue caught in the outlines of Rui’s hair, fragments falling down his face, their arms. “I’d like to think so.”

“You know,” says Rui, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. The speakers, through muffled voices, tell them they’ve entered a few minute’s break, as the committee prepares for the next showing. He looks away, for a while, at the surrounding lanterns, people walking uphill to the food stalls. “I’d like to think that the world starts when morning comes.”

“You reckon that’s true?” Jirou doesn’t know where they’re headed now, from here on out, but he tilts his head, curious, urging him on.

“Yup! I was looking at the sky and just thought that― _yeah.._.” There’s a stagger in the hand he holds in the air between them. His fingers curls in, into his palm, a moment’s hesitance, before reaching out.

Rui’s smile is sheepish, perhaps a little self-conscious.

He brushes back Jirou’s hair from his eyes, tucks them behind his ear, and oh―

_Oh―_

Jirou is fairly sure, that this time, at least, the patch of his skin where Rui's fingers had left, are as red as Rui’s cheeks are now.

“So I was wondering, if it’d be easier for you to find what you’re looking, when it’s morning for you.”

It feels like it’s the first time that Jirou has allowed himself to look, _really_ _look_ , at Rui’s face — at the crinkle in Rui’s eyes he usually passes over, in favour of the chalk dust on the cuff of his shirtsleeve, around the pocket of his pants.

He has freckles too, he notices, scattered across the bridge of his nose.

Also this time, Jirou thinks, for once, he could actually see the kind of expression he makes, in the one Rui mirrors in return.

His morning might have come, at a little past ten in the evening — in the sunflower fields across the river, Rui’s hand clutching on to his, throughout a whistle of yellow fireworks.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Someone once said to me that Rui is a sunflower given human form, and I've never stopped thinking about that since. Thank you, for finding this old man. I'm glad that it was you. Thank you, for bringing your own little light along with you.
> 
> Thank you, for being you. Happy birthday.


End file.
